Monday, June 10, 2013

Welcome to the Jungle. We've Got Fun and Games!

Do you like to receive unsolicited advice? Of course you do. Well, my advice to you this morning is not to attempt to bunnyhop someone who just got hit by a car unless you're absolutely sure you can clear the victim:

I'm not really sure what happened here, but it seems like the perfect storm of poor course design, poor race marshaling, and the willingness of the typical road racer to run over his own mother for a mid-pack finish:

Has made another video, which I won't even bother to embed because it's totally lame, and indeed it's really only noteworthy because she obtained a new hairdo and a series of Botox injections this time around:

The whole thing's just profoundly sad at this point. Basically, it's like the "bike lobby" pinched her ass at the shuffleboard court, and while she may have pretended not to like it she went back to her condo, got all gussied up, and then returned to the scene of the crime in the hopes that it would happen again.

Sadly for her, it's not gonna. She made "The Daily Show" and that's as good as it's going to get. Time to get back in your coffin and close the door.

And who proposed the sorts of "livable streets" reforms that would have made the people at Streetsblog mess their shants:To relieve traffic congestion, Buckley proposed charging cars a fee to enter the central city, and a network of bike lanes.
I'm not sure what happened since then, but I blame pretty much all the negativity that comes our way on Portland and stupid stuff like the World Naked Bike Ride:

Portland is living proof that a society without shame quickly devolves into something about as culturally redeeming as a child's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

While New York City's nearly two-week-old bike-share program already is among the largest in the world, it's passing over neighborhoods where nearly 90% of the city population lives.The solar-powered docking stations and the nearly 6,000 stocky blue Citi Bikes are located in Manhattan below 59th Street and selected neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Vast swaths of the city—including Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, most of Brooklyn and much of Manhattan—are left bikeless.

The line for helmets was very long, and yet few of the people I spoke to were actually residents of the Rutgers Houses or any of the neighboring public housing. I did, however, meet a svelte Argentine woman in running clothes who had come from the Upper East Side. There were also two young women who taught at Bard High School Early College and lived in brownstone Brooklyn, and a woman named Barbara Becker in the company of two sons who, she said when I inquired, attend Friends Seminary in Manhattan, where annual tuition is roughly 296 times the price of an expensive bike helmet (and 1,850 times the price of a helmet you can buy at Han’s Market, a convenience store next to the Clark Street kiosk that has quickly expanded its business from milk, soda and frozen foods to biking gear).
Oddly the Times is very upset about wealthy people snatching up all the cheap bike helments, but they have no problem with those same people hogging all the real estate.

Even some avid cyclists, like 32-year-old Brooklynite Kym Chamber, treated the new bikes with skepticism. She worried about the safety of inexperienced cyclists unaccustomed to New York’s eat-or-be-eaten roads. And she wondered whether the influx of newbies would clog up the bike lanes, already too few and too narrow.“I just don’t see this becoming the new Amsterdam,” Chambers said.

You do realize you're actually in New Amsterdam, right Kym?

Of course you do.

Lastly, if you're a redhead who likes ice cream you totally missed your chance to get laid:

redhead with bike on 1st ave 4th st eating ice cream - w4m (East Village)saturday afternoon i passed the cutest red head leaning against his bike, eating ice cream in front of a deli on 1st ave and 4th st. i stopped mid sentence and my stomach sank. he completely did not see me other than a quick look at my leg and he'll never see this but im posting this anyway because he was so cute. and had cute and tan freckly bike legs.
drool. if your hot ginger bike friend was around the east village on saturday tell him to send me his picture!

Finally tried the Citi Bike share program this weekend. The bikes and program were great for running errands; very convenient, easy to use.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to swap the bike’s factory pedals for my clipless. My dog insists he and his buddies had no problems. He also told me you get a discount for riding in a full lycra kit, but I couldn’t figure out how that worked either.

The only real problem was that one kiosk in Brooklyn wasn’t working yesterday morning, another wasn’t working last night, and three others weren’t working this morning. But customer support was great; they insist on staying on the line until they guide you to a kiosk that works.

I suspect Dotty Rabinowitz is the problem. She looks like a gremlin who would sabotage software.

Or if not a gremlin, then to quote Sacha Baron Cohen, a midget in a chemo wig.

Sorry BikeSnob, but you are way off on the bit about the racer who bunny hopped the person in the road. What else was he to do at 30mph coming into that situation? Hit the car? Crash into the field? He did the best thing possible, avoiding hurting the person in the street, did so taking the risk himself.

No top 10, need captcha epo. Had to know more about bike crash. Interweb search turned up details. Keystone Kops, all of them, but BikeHugger sez deft bike handling on part of the failed bunny hopper prevented more injury. I'm so confused. I guess so. They could have all gone done in a spectacular heap. Then we would have had Nascar and both spectators could have thrown their beer bottles at them.

A happy Monday cloacal kiss for all of you. In case you were wondering why the dbags at the Jernal hate bike share so much, it is neatly summarized at the link below. (As usual, the real drama is in the comments.)

The Gina Bellafante NY Times article was much better than you make it out to be.

In the first sentence Bellafante calls out Dorothy Rabinowitz as spending "four minutes making crazy-lady assertions about cycling’s hold on New York"

Bellafante then goes on to voice support for the bike sharing and tries it out for herself. She finds the system buggy and cannot get a bike. She is a journalist, she reports it. Nothing wrong there.

She then checks out a helmet distribution program designed to get low-income people safely on bikes and she finds a bunch of privileged white people at the front of the freebie line. Sounds like she has found the David Byrne Zone.

I don't know. That struck official seems like an unfortunate situation that didn't go from bad to worse.

Look at all the people that weren't there to watch.

Typical of USAC, they'll now enforce some rule never-before enforced despite being in the rule book for decades and raise insurance rates.

Lucky for you USAC members, you weren't spending enough money going around in circles with no one watching or caring. Now you'll get to spend $1 more on insurance that denies claims and complain bitterly about the dollar while riding a $10,000 bicycle.

i'd bitch that is was monday and i'd bitch about stupid people hating simple concepts like the bike share, but i will not bitch because i was pulled over today for doing a rolling stop at a stop sign (in a car. it was in a neighborhood at 5 mph) and was also informed that i had a warrant out in GA for an unpaid ticked. he let me go without even a written warning. nice guy that cop. so, i can't bitch.

Rich ngtCntr - looks like rich nugget center. which sounds like a thing.

Saw you heading the opposite way on the GWB yesterday. I hope you had a nice ride. I did until my stem's binder bolt sheared off near the Javits center and the bike became unrideable. With the bars like that, I wouldn't been able to bunny hop anymore people either.

Mikeweb -- If I had known that was you, I would have stopped to say hello. (I seem to have some allergies this past week that have made my ears feel like they're filled with chocolate pudding, so I wouldn't have heard you if you had called out.)

Had a great ride. Went to Nyack, tried out Gypsy Donuts. Pretty good.

I had to ride. My dog had already convinced me to kit up to run errands on the Citi Bike earlier.

Sorry about the binder bolt! Hope you didn't find out whether you can still go over the handlebars if the bars come off in your hands.

When I first tried the Paris Velib it took fifteen tries to get one that a) took an American credit card (an AMEX finally worked) and b) wasn't in a Windows XP reset loop. Yep, Velib runs on XP. Eeks-Pay, I think they say it. When I finally got a bike, the lock on it was broken and it took several tries to find a rack with an empty space to leave it.

I used to like schoolin' the young'uns. Usually they haven't had anyone with SKILLZ yet, and you can easily make them come, blow their mind and earn their doglike loyalty, by use of only rudimentary techniques.

Which is when it occurred to me that "Watching The Detectives" is subtextually about this, particularly the line "It only took my little fingers to blow you away." Discuss.

Fortunately for this second stem failure for me now in the last 3 years, it occurred at a very low speed, so I managed to brake to a stop. The last time it happened, I had to improvise by steering one handed with the stem (a 110) whilst braking with the other hand.

Dorothy must be living on the reverse aging planet. Having hit 100 she is now heading back down the chronological sequence. In her younger days she was a bunny at the Playboy Club, and she was known for her hopping. Hopping right in the sack with any media mogul who came along and promised her a part. She got a part alright.

The video bunny hopper launched himself by going right straight up the guys butt crack, excellent handling. To bad he couldn't land it, would have been sweet. Electricity from the Chevy Volt electrocuted some dog on the sidewalk who ran out to bite the car, the car swerved to miss the dog (always better to run over a person instead of a dog, the dog just thinks "WTF", whereas a person screams "Mother F'er"), wonder if Leroy's dog was in that area at that time?

The morning ride was going fine until some motherfucker in a black Lexus SUV hit my riding partner while we were descending the lower part of Page Mill Road in the Los Altos Hills. Didn't even slow down, just kept going with a big dent in the right-front quarter panel. Out of cell range, so calling 911 didn't work. Partner flew through the air and landed on his shoulder, bruising it badly, something of a miracle landing, so he's alive with a pending visit to the doctor and some road rash.

The funny thing is that a few minutes before it happened, I was musing on the idea that if someone from the wealthy neighborhood we were riding through hit a cyclist, they would probably keep going so as not to disturb their own day.

Now it's not so funny. May the Karmic Shitstorm find the Fuckstick Dildoburger in that Lexus...and soon, before he does it to anyone else.

"Fuckstick dildoburger in a black Lexus SUV" - you're going to have to be more specific, you just described every driver of a black Lexus SUV. Oh, that's right, the dint from running down a cyclist, that should hopefully narrow it down a bit. Hope your buddy recovers quickly.

After I received a brief health screening at the Senior's Center,the nurse speculated that I will not die of heart disease, so that leaves some other interesting possibilities.(People in their thirties worry about ageing but when you hit sixty you accept that you are doomed)If not death by heart disease I don't need to worry about Terminal Bonk when riding.Still, training injuries could be a bitch.

Yarpo@632: Those GoPro type Russian dashboard mounted cameras are looking more and more like a necessity for bikes, maybe you would have gotten the license number. This past Sunday I was on a descent approaching a traffic light which was green for me, about 25 yards before I reached the intersection a car ran the red light, going completely across the intersection from left to right, and it was flying. And I couldn't see it approaching the intersection because of trees and brush. If not for a little difference in timing I could have been splattered all over the hood.

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About Me

While I love cycling and embrace it in all its forms, I'm also extremely critical. So I present to you my venting for your amusement and betterment. No offense meant to the critiqued. Always keep riding!